Helping 17 million kids read and interact with the Bible like never before

Bible App For Kids

Cross-Platform DevelopmentAnimationIllustration

The Challenge

Tell the key stories of the Bible in a way that is fun, entertaining, educational
and engaging for kids.

Our Solution

We redefined the storybook app by creating a platform with a
modular and adaptive approach to story production.

+17 Million

Total App Installs

Reached #2

In The App Store

In 30 Languages

And Used In +80 Countries

Unique Challenges

Richer content with a broader reach

With the Bible for Kids app, we set out to create an app that can handle 40 stories
and scale to over 30 languages, while providing the best possible experience for kids.
The app needed to be something that would help kids not only learn the Bible, but learn
to love the Bible. Plus, it needed to work on iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Android
tablets and Kindle devices, all on day one.

With a project this size it’s important to identify what’s really at the
heart of it: we knew that no matter how well engineered it was, if kids didn’t
love using it, it was a failure. With this in mind we decided to start with just a single
scene from one story. We iterated on that scene until we understood what it took to
make kids smile and ask for more. Armed with this knowledge, we began to map out the
entire app.

Play Testing

Learning through play

Throughout the design and development process we brought in kids of all ages and let
them play with what we had been building. We were able to see how they responded
to our content. We were able to see which features worked, and which weren’t ready.
Kids can be brutally honest, and their feedback is often unfiltered. We knew right away
when our work was great and it brought smiles to their faces.

With a project this size it’s essential to identify what’s really at the heart.

Interactions and Animations

The recipe for engagement and fun

A key theme of our ongoing play tests was that making stories fun requires lots of
animations and interactions. None of the kids we worked with were interested in a static
story. After all, these are touch screens. The first thing each kid did when they began
a story was tap the characters and elements to see what they did. If they didn’t
receive immediate visual and audio feedback from that interaction, they quickly became
disinterested, and did not enjoy the app.

This meant that we not only had to have great animations with rich sound, but we needed
to have a lot of them on every scene. This presented a huge technical hurdle: how do we
quickly create lots of animations and interactions, without slowing the devices to
a crawl, or filling up the memory on a device. Oven Bits created several new methods to
enable over-the-air downloads of new stories, and a simple scripting technology to
enable anyone to create great animations.

Planning to Production

Bringing it all together

Once we solved the challenge of keeping stories engaging and interesting, it was time to
begin the process of building out dozens of stories across multiple languages with rich
animations and interactions. Our team of animators brought the illustrations to life
using cutting-edge tools for character animation. Using a simplified workflow, we
were able to produce engaging and rich animations that demanded a fraction of the
resources normally required for a project of this size.

The Oven Bits team of designers, animators, developers across multiple platforms and
client teams all worked tirelessly to develop the initial launch of the apps across
3 app stores and hundreds of devices on day one. In addition to our internal team, we
coordinated and worked with an even larger group of third-party illustrators,
storytellers and of course, kids, to get the project completed on time and on budget.
And, with over 2 million downloads in the first 30 days, we achieved the
project’s goals.

The End Result

#1 in hearts and the app store

Bible App for Kids was one of the most rewarding projects we’ve tackled at
Oven Bits. Many of us were able to include our own children in the play tests, and
there’s nothing quite as motivating as getting status inquiries from your 9 year
old every night over dinner. In order to tell one of the oldest stories around we came
up with something entirely new. Bible App for Kids not only teaches kids the important
stories of the Bible, but it helps them learn to love reading it.

“Reimagining and scaling the Bible to be multi-device, multi-platform and multi-lingual.”